[ On Fri, September 13, 1996 at 14:55:50 (+0100), Philip Hazel wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: perl location
>
> People keep saying "autoconf" at me, and I keep ducking. How long I can
> keep this up, I don't know. :-) I'm told by our own experts that (a) it
> is a big learning cliff and (b) it is a large hammer for this particular
> nut.
It depends on how close your current management of portability problems
matches its approach, and how your build procedure matches what it
expects. A quick run through its manual should give you some idea of
how difficult the conversion might be.
With the help of automake I was able to convert my first small package
(a finger daemon) to use autoconf in a matter of a half hour or so. I
admit I had already tweaked a few autoconf configurations of existing
packages to fix various problems, but it wasn't in any way a steap
climb. In fact I found it worked more the way I expected things to work
than anything else! ;-)
Converting smail-3 would/will be a bit more daunting task as smail has
already tackled the same problems with a slightly off-kilter approach.
However I think the majority of the coversion could be completed in a
day, with fine tuning (i.e. ferreting out other portability issues that
should be dealt with properly) to take another day or two's concentrated
effort (i.e. it would spread out over a week or so, hopefully with the
help of a few other hackers.
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 443-1734 VE3TCP robohack!woods
Planix, Inc. <woods@???>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@???>
